Waiting for Barbara by Dan Fishback: A Reading on the Tenth Anniversary of the War in Iraq

Date

March 21 2013 at 19:00

Description

“Have you no sense of HISTORY, Davenport? Do you realize what this MEANS?! For the daughter of the President of the United States to arrive at an Opening Night War Party with two homosexuals?! Don’t you comprehend the ramifications of this invitation?! We’ve won, Davenport! We’ve won!”
—Dan Fishback, Waiting for Barbara (2006)

Dan Fishback’s upsetting, frantic comedy Waiting for Barbara takes place on March 20, 2003—the first night of the War in Iraq. Two gay Yale seniors are waiting for the President’s daughter (also a Yale student) to bring them to “an opening night war party” on campus. She is late, so they occupy themselves with drugs, racism, and mutually assured emotional destruction.

Ten years after that night—the tenth anniversary of the war—Fishback is revisiting his play to memorialize the senseless deaths of over 100,000 casualties, and to reconsider the relationship between white gay men and the violent power structures of Western imperialism. The reading will be followed by a public conversation with Fishback about the play, the war, and ongoing debates about pinkwashing and homonationalism.